Calling all year 12's

Well basically as Stef said in her last post, I have been composing a email to send out to the year 12's asking them whether they would be intrested in starring in our teaser trailer. (see below)
Stef and I got the list of Year 12 theatre students from head of drama. Th poster outlines what we want them to do, what it's for and when we need them. Stef and I sent it out yesterday (29/09/09) and already we have had six responses. We have decided that we will hold another audition but we are still hopeful for a few more responses by the time we send out the email. Stef is currently writing it and will blog about it once we have sent it out.
This is the email I sent out

Helena

We're on YouTube!

We now have our own YouTube channel which can be visited through the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/group6media61681.

I have created it today and will be updating and adding content to our channel throughout the project, so please subcribe!

We have decided as a group that one of our forthcoming blog posts will be available in media form on the blog, which was my idea.

I have also suggested to the rest of the team to add labels to their blog posts. Please click on a label if you are seeking to read a specific topic that interests you on our blog

Jack

"Thanks for auditioning guys..."

Well, after hosting the auditions (which went really well), we decided to go with an older age group and also audition some year twelves. We asked the head of the drama department to give us the names of all the theatre students in year twelve and have sent them an email to ask them to audition. In the mean time, we delivered the letter posted to the two girls we auditioned to let them know the news.

Helena will upload the email we have sent to the year twelves and we hope they will reply as soon as possible. We will then host some auditions and hope to begin properly filming next Tuesday 6th October after school. Our actresses will be chosen based on both their acting capabilities and that they are able to film on the alloted days we have chosen. We drew up a table of all the days we can each do to film in today's media lesson and have chosen the first couple of days to film and where we will film. In the mean time, we are individually going to do some location scouting to determine which locations we will use.

Stef

Casting calls

Stef and I created a poster for the casting calls and handed it around some Year 9 girls to see who would be intrested as mentioned in a previous blog.

This was the poster that we created














Helena

Spreading the word

We can now get as much feedback as possible as I've set up a Facebook group for our media, which will allow us to upload videos and allow our audience to give us their opinions.

Nat

Auditions

Well, today we had our auditions for the two girls who will be the main focus in our media film. We sent out a notice to a set of Year Nine girls who displayed a premlimary interest in acting in our teaser trailer.
When we arrived at the auditions there were two girls waiting and we auditioned them using a extract from a book of short plays. We were impressed in how they took direction and became invovled in the charecters that they played.
The only problem we do face is the fact that they are quite young and we may have the issue of gaining parental permission. So we are considering also audtioning Year 12 theatre studies students as they should be confident in acting for us.
If we do use Year 12 students then we will ask the Year 9 students to play a part by singing the nursery rhyme, 'Mary Mary, quite contary' as they have fairly high pitiched voices which can sound fairly childish and eerie.

Now we have started our auditions we have more of an idea of what we are looking for so when we do audition the Year 12's, hopefully we will find people who fit the part that we are looking for. Meanwhile, we are working on our storyboards and starting to think about the film poster.

Helena

Finally

Hello,
I have finally got the blog log on in to work so this is my first ever post with my new group.
I have been working on the narrative for the last couple of the days with my group and I am going to post our current concept below.

A girl is all alone in a playground by herself, she will be filmed in many different angles and then swinging on the swing. As she is at the highest point of the swing a second girl will appear. Each time the swing reaches the highest point then the second girl will appear closer and closer each time until Girl A stops singing and speaks to Girl B.
During their conversation we will play a voice over recorded by Girl A's mother saying to her "I wish you had more friends".
We will show the girls becoming friends until a change happens. This will be signified by a change in music and faster cuts. This will be teasing towards what is wrong with girl B. Ideas that we have had for this section includes, Girl A looking into a mirror and Girl B being there and when Girl A turns around Girl B has disappeared. Finally the climax will be the final scene in which Girl B walks into the sea in a way which does not appear right. The song will change right at the end so that it will be a rendition of the nursery rhyme 'Mary Mary'. The idea is that Girl B is actually dead and is not as she appears.
That is the basic narrative, we are planning to film extra scenes because we found last year that we did not have enough footage.

Currently at school, Stef and I wrote a preliminary storyboard with which Nat is now creating the version that we will film with. Tommorow Stef and I are auditioning some year 9's for the role of the two girls.

Helena

Update

We have a final plot all decided, which Helena will blog about soon as she's having a few problems logging in right now. However, we are currently storyboarding, for which Nat is doing the drawings and Helena and I will help her with the writing and description of each shot.
As for actors, Helena and I are hosting auditions with a few year nine girls from our school tomorrow. We are going to supply them with a script to read infront of us to see their confidence and see who's right for which role. Our group has also decided to audition some year twelve theatre students to see which age group would work better for our teaser trailer.
All of us are also gonna load up the questionnaire Jack mentioned onto our Facebooks to try and get as many responses as we can.

Stef

Initial Questionnaire on SurveyMonkey

A short while ago, Helena and I created a questionnaire which helped us choose the genre of the teaser trailer for the project. This is the first questionnaire and the purpose of it is to help us narrow down our research for more specific codes and conventions of the genre we finally chose.

If you are willing to be involved in our research then please click here. The questionnaire has been uploading to SurveyMonkey which we have chosen to use because it is easy to create and easy to edit our questionnaire, all of our responses are collected in one place and it will provide us with detailed statistics about the choices you, the audience, have provided! All information gathered is confidential and will not be shared under the Data Protection Act 1998, see Part 1.2.

If you would like to share the link with your friends then please provide them http://bit.ly/15pXlb which will forward them to SurveyMonkey. We'd really appreciate it.

We will be posting the link on various social networking sites to spread the word. Thank you.

Jack

Choosin' a plot...

Well due to the school having a burst water pipe on Wednesday and Thursday, we did miss some media lessons but the four of us met up during a free to continue developing four main narrative ideas.
We discussed existing horror film narratives that we liked including "I am legend", "28 days later" and "The Unborn". The four of us then talked and discussed our narrative ideas and took one each to continue with over the weekend.
So we've all set ourselves the homework of completeing a rough storyboard for one of these ideas each so we can choose a plot to go with for our teaser trailer

Stef

Few ideas to throw around...

In our most recent media lesson the four of us played with a few ideas for narratives for our teaser trailer.
John Hartley believed that "genre are agents of idealogical closure - they limit the meaning/potential of a given text" - (O'Sullican et al. 1994,128).
As a reflection of this, I decided to do some research into the horror genre and its' codes and conventions. I suggest that we make sure we continue to return to these to make sure our teaser trailer clearly portrays the genre we have chosen!

1. A fear of death is always present in a horror film
2. Binary oppositions of good versus evil
3. Fear created in a horror film is based on our most deep, instintive fears e.g. paranoia that someone is always watching you, fear of the unknown, vunerability etc.
4. A collapse of moral order
5. May include violence/gore
6. May explore taboo subjects such as the corruption of children and innocence
7. Continue to play on the minds of the viewers even after watching the film
8. Plays on the dread/suspense the audience feels as watching

So there you have it (: also, the four of us came up with a few ideas for narratives so will put them up here too. They are very vague so far and so we will continue this week to develop these ideas:

1. Plot 1 - a camping/holiday trip going wrong
2. Plot 2 - clown based horror
3. Plot 3 - sleepover based horror
4. Plot 4 - a news bulletin on a monster based pandemic
5. Plot 5 - friendships that are not as they appear

Still, other ideas may also come to us as we continue to discuss in class so watch this space!

Stef

NEWS FLASH!

Hi,

In our lesson today, we had to go over everything that we had already done with Stef and Helena (our newest group member) so once everyone was caught up we came up with some idea's for our teaser trailer and I can say we are all extremely excited about this year!

Nat